Fighting games have presented a formidable challenge for me, yet there is an undeniable allure to their complexity and depth. My relationship with them for most of my life has been a distant one. I enjoy watching them in tournaments like Evo, but I’ve always been a beginner when playing them myself. There are a couple of fighting game series I enjoy playing though, despite my lack of skill. I played a lot of Tekken 7, earning the platinum trophy but spending way more time just playing with friends online. With Tekken 8’s announcement, I decided I would try and be more active with the game this time. Try and learn to play properly, practice with a character or two and play online enough to at least call myself decent. So when Tekken 8 was released in January I was there on day one, jumping into the fray to try one of the new characters that grabbed my interest, ready to try and become the King of Iron Fist once more.
The fighting game series that I enjoy seem to be the ones with low barriers to entry, but incredibly high skill ceilings, with Tekken and Guilty Gear being the main ones I’ve enjoyed. The other things these have in common though, are how good they look, and how fun they are to watch as well as play, and Tekken 8 is the pinnacle of this. The game looks incredible, each of the characters and stages has amazing designs and detail to them. The fighter’s movements and attacks are all buttery smooth, and it’s almost hypnotic to watch characters dance back and forth, watching the flow of pokes and blocks, whiffed strikes and thrilling counters that is just as exciting to watch, as it is to play.
Tekken 8 big change is its evolution into a more aggressive beast than its predecessors. Blocked moves doing chip damage, and having recoverable health when you hit your opponent, incentivise you to be constantly poking and looking for weaknesses to take advantage of. The new heat mechanic gives each player more opportunity to push their attack or break out of being stuck in a corner, and this made the game feel more dynamic and exciting than any other Tekken before.
With each character having so many options and routes to victory, each match can feel incredibly different depending on the map or character choices. It is difficult to understate quite how much fun I have had with Tekken even in the parts I usually struggle with, like learning a character and practising their moves.
Fighting games in general, can be a daunting thing to approach and if I’m honest Tekken can feel like one of the most intimidating. The varied roster of unique characters, all have an insane amount of options to play with. Characters each have upwards of 100 different moves you can use, and dozens of different combos and stances to switch between. Learning how these all link together and can be used feels like a momentous task, and this is before you ever leave the practice screen, when you bring another player into the mix, you need to be aware of their combos too, what can be blocked, what can be dodged and how you can punish. How quick your timing needs to be to get your hits in, how many moves can or can’t be sidestepped and so on. It’s an incredible amount to remember, and honestly one of the reasons I don’t consider myself particularly good at these games is that I struggle with the split-second decisions you have to make to beat someone else. I believe this is one of the reasons a lot of people avoid fighting games too, the complexity and time investment needed to get to a decent level can be a lot to ask.
Fighting games in general have all struggled with this problem, how to get new players on board and up to speed in a way that isn’t too overwhelming or complicated. Tekken 8 does a really good job of trying to move in the right direction though. It has so many systems here to help new players learn, and for someone who isn’t new but just isn’t good, these systems are a perfect addition to the series.
The first of these is the Special Style system. You can drop in and out of this mode at the touch of a button, and what it does is simplify the complex inputs you need to do a combo, to a single button. One button for air combos, one for throws and lows, one for specials and one for guard crushes. These combos can change slightly depending on the state of your character or your opponents, but in general, they take most of the difficulty out of the execution part of the game, which leaves you to focus on other fundamentals, like spacing, and blocking, learning the rhythm of the fights. It is a great system, that I didn’t appreciate at first, thinking it was just an easy-mode, but after using it a little while when I was playing through some of the offline modes, I realised it’s designed to give you just a taste of what a character can do and how cool a combo will look, and encourage you to experiment and refine your own skills once you have the basics down.
Tekken backs this up with its helpful game mode, called Arcade Quest. Arcade quest is an optional structured tutorial mode with a story, where your avatar fights around different arcades, in an attempt to partake in the Tekken World Tour. You start as someone new to Tekken, and the game puts you through your paces with some very well thought-out tutorials. These only explain the basics, in a digestible way, and let you practice them as much as you want. Once you are done with the tutorial fights, you will then play some CPU fights to put those lessons to the test and raise your in-game rank. For example one of the Arcades tutorials is focused on how to break defensive players, teaching you when to go low or when to throw to get around these types of players and keep the pressure on. Then when you go to fight your way through the arcade, all of the players are much more defensive than any of the other players you have been against. I found this to be a clever way to enforce lessons while still being fun.
Once the lessons have been learned and the Arcade Quest is behind you though, it’s time to practice for real, and Tekken’s practice mode is better than ever. In practice mode you can pin parts of a character move-list, or sample combos the game provides to the top of the screen so that you can see them as your practice, with a simple button combination, you can choose to see the combo or move demonstrated, to give you a sense of the timing you need. It also has incredibly detailed information about each move as you do them, including frame data when you get into the gritty details of each move.
As you scroll through the move list for your character, you will see little notes or symbols, telling you more information about what the move can do. Some of the combos even tell you when they are best used.
The practice mode also has a punishment training section which is the thing I find the most useful. You can choose a character you are struggling with, set it to punishment training and the game will get the character to do some of the more common strings of attacks they have, show you where they will hit, and how to punish when you have blocked them. The game also has a replay and tips section, where you can rewatch one of your matches and it will offer you tips on what to do differently, and let you jump into the match again to let you practice what to do.
Even outside of all the ways Tekken 8 helps you learn the game, there is a myriad of offline options for people to play through. There is the standard arcade mode, where you fight 8 opponents back to back which has existed since the dawn of time of course, and the Arcade Quest mode I mentioned before. However there are also Character episodes, a small 5 battle gauntlet with a unique intro and ending scene for each of Tekken 8’s 32 characters, there is Tekken Ball, a beach ball mini-game where you use your character move to slam a beach ball at each other, and there are the Super Ghost Battles. These are interesting because although this can be done completely offline, you can download ghosts of friends or people you have fought, to practice against, or you can train your own ghost by fighting against them, to improve by fighting yourself. I found this to be such an interesting idea, that I definitely feel will help you feel out your own weaknesses.
Lastly, there is Tekken 8’s story mode, The Dark Awakens. I played Tekken 7 many years ago and its story mode was my least favourite part of the game, but Tekken 8’s is a huge improvement. It is still an insane story focused on the Mishima family and their longstanding feuds, but there is a heart to it that I couldn’t help but get drawn into. It has 15 chapters and they are all relatively short, maybe taking just over an hour to finish them all if you rush through but they are good showcases of each character and what they can do. Although you spend most of the chapter’s fights playing as Jin, the story’s protagonist, there are moments where you can play other characters for a short bout. It’s a good way to get a feel for each character or see what they can do if they are your opponent, and might help you pick a character you like the look of when you want to play online.
All of these options make for a rather meaty single-player experience, but that isn’t really what people play Tekken for. Why spend so much time in practice, if you aren’t going to go online and get absolutely bodied for a few hours. There are three main online modes in the game. The first of these and the most simple, are the Player Matches, where you and your friends can sit in a premade room, and you can fight it out, with the people not fighting being able to spectate. Then there is the ranked mode, where you can compete online to try and improve your rank. Lastly, there is the Tekken Lounge, which is a lobby that combines a lot of the above things. Here you can create an avatar and go and sit at arcade machines to play against other people in unranked matches, buy customisation items for your Characters, or your Avatar, or you can go to the beach lounge to play Tekken Ball online.
It’s a nice addition to the game overall but as someone who prefers to sit in practice while they wait for a ranked match, it isn’t somewhere I have spent a lot of time.
Performance-wise, Tekken 8 plays superbly online. I’ve had a few issues with dodgy connections but I feel like that is unavoidable in such a huge online fighting game like Tekken, and for the most part, most of my connections have been great. With crossplay between PC and Consoles enabled too, it rarely feels like I am waiting long for a match, especially so near to launch when the player base is at its highest, and that means less time waiting for the fun to happen, which is perfect.
When it comes to trophies, the Tekken series tends to fall on the side of favouring its offline content, which for a trophy hunter is great. There is a trophy for reaching a certain rank, which in most online games is usually the longest or hardest of the trophies, but Tekken is kind, and lets you use your offline rank for this trophy. What this means is essentially it’s unmissable, as the Arcade Quest mode, gets you to this rank by the time you have finished its story. The bulk of the trophies are like this too, the majority of them come from story progression or by doing the side content. Things like Defeat 10 CPU ghost battles or complete 10 Character Episodes are relatively easy things to do even if you are a beginner as most of the offline content you can choose the difficulty for, and just rely on the Special Style auto combos for. Relying on these will also get you the majority of the miscellaneous trophies too, like Heat Dashing 10 times, or doing Wall Breaks, Floor Breaks and so on.
Some of these, like Wall and Floor Blasts, can only be earned on certain maps so you may need to use the Ghost Battles if you want to do these offline as they are the only mode you can choose the map you fight on.
The online trophies are similarly easy, asking you to only win one player match, one ranked match, and one group match, and then play 10, and these might be the hardest trophies in the game. The hardest trophy in my opinion, is the one for customising your character, because there are so many options to choose from, you may never leave the customisation screen but if you can manage it, the Platinum Trophy “A fight is about survival” will be yours.
I believe if you don’t do what I did and get distracted playing online so much, the platinum can be earned in around 8 hours.
At the end of it all, I feel like Tekken 8 is something special. It’s one of the best-looking fighting games I think I’ve ever played, and it is one of the most engaging as someone who isn’t a fighting game expert. Its combination of exhilarating aggression and thoughtful and calculated defence makes every single match an absolute blast to play. It does so much to try and help teach you the skills you need and it might be the best fighting game for a beginner to jump into, despite Tekken being such a legacy skill-based franchise. For seasoned tekken god veterans, the game offers a new level of depth with its new systems and characters that will keep you playing for years to come. With such an easy Platinum trophy attached to such a great game, I would highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in the genre.
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